Sixty Degrees North

by Malachy Tallack

  Despite these differences, there’s been a great deal of collaboration and integration between the states since the Second World War, and indeed their development through the twentieth century was remarkable in part for the degree to which each chose very similar political roads. Social democratic parties began forming governments and coalitions across the Nordic countries in the Great Depression of the 1930s. Their response to that crisis shaped the region socially as well as economically, and it continues to do so even today. A comprehensive system of welfare, pensions, social housing and healthcare provision, paid for through high taxation and pursued alongside growth and full employment, gradually transformed these nations from economic backwaters into some of the wealthiest in the world. Each of them today boasts an excellent standard of living, combined with low levels of poverty and high levels of income and gender equality. Recent decades have seen liberalisation in their economies, but the Nordic Model, as it’s become known, is still looked upon enviously by social democrats the world over. It is still the goal to which others aspire.

  But just as many are eager always to laud the social achievements of these countries, others are equally quick to point to a ‘dark heart’ within the Scandinavian system – a rot that threatens to consume and destroy the positive image projected onto the world. Right-wing extremism is one part of that rot, and its growth in the region has been noted with dismay by liberals across the continent. Ethnic nationalism seems somehow out of place in countries such as these, particularly in Sweden, which until recently had been perhaps the most enthusiastically multicultural and pro-immigration of all European states. There has, undoubtedly, been a change here – a turn towards the right, and a worrying embrace of xenophobic politics among a minority of the population. But ethnic nationalism has been on the rise right across Europe over the past two decades: France, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, and increasingly the UK, have all seen support for far-right parties increase. The difference in Scandinavia is the sense that such parties ought not to exist there. Such is the degree to which tolerance and social cohesion are portrayed as defining Scandinavian characteristics that current trends have begun to undermine what people outside the region understand it to be. Paradoxically, many Nordic nationalists justify their hostility to immigration by highlighting the threat that multiculturalism poses to the society they have worked so hard to create. By allowing those whose culture is illiberal to come in, they argue – and Muslims are most often the target of this troubling logic – liberalism itself is endangered.

  Another development, this time more imagined than real, is crime. In the world of fiction, a parallel Scandinavia, where murder is commonplace, has been growing for decades. It has become a literary and small-screen sensation. Writers such as Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Karin Fossum and others have held up a distorting mirror to their society. Engagement with social and political realities is a distinguishing characteristic of much ‘Nordic noir’, but the place depicted in these stories is not one that would be familiar to any visitor to the countries in which they’re set. Both Norway and Sweden have among the lowest murder rates in Europe, and part of the success of the genre is that very contradiction. Scandinavian crime writing sits at odds with what its readers think they know about Scandinavia; it disfigures and exaggerates the raw material of its location, and is all the more unsettling for that.

  It has been said that one single event stands behind the eruption in Nordic crime fiction in recent decades: the assassination of the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in February 1986. That event was shocking enough at the time, but the fact the murder remains unsolved so many years later has left a wound in the country’s politics, and a mystery that refuses to go away. The more time that passes, the more the mystery deepens. In 2011, Norway had its own catastrophic event, which, though very different in character and scale, may yet prove as culturally significant. That the bombings in Oslo and the shootings on the island of Utøya, which together killed 77 people, were carried out by a Norwegian nationalist, who called his actions an attack on Islam, multiculturalism and Marxism, made it somehow all the more shocking. Few could ever have believed that something like this could happen in open, tolerant Norway.

  Outside the country, there was a tendency to frame the actions of Anders Behring Breivik within the wider changes in Scandinavian politics and society. Some pointed again to that growing Nordic extremism, and to the region’s shift away from its previously-held values, while others argued the opposite: that those very values were at fault, and were somehow responsible for creating the cultural tensions that led to these attacks. Within Norway, however, there was considerable resistance to the idea that these events should be allowed any kind of context. For the crime writer Jo Nesbø, Breivik’s self-justification did not deserve to be taken seriously. ‘He represents himself and not many others,’ the writer argued. ‘From a social or political point of view, this is not a very interesting event.’

  If crimes such as the massacre in Norway or the murder of Olof Palme are more likely in Scandinavia it may be only because security measures in these countries are less intrusive than elsewhere. And that, many feel, is a risk worth preserving. In the Nordic nations, the possibility of tragedy is considered preferable to the security measures that might be required to prevent it; and that, in the Western world, is a refreshing view. When Oslo’s mayor, Fabian Stang, was asked whether this attitude would need to change in the wake of Breivik’s attacks, he responded: ‘I don’t think security can solve problems. We need to teach greater respect.’ The country’s prime minister Jens Stoltenber echoed that sentiment. ‘The Norwegian response to violence,’ he said, ‘is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation.’

  The last time I was in Oslo, I was with Jeff and a small group of other friends. All of us were students in Copenhagen at the time, and were spending our Easter break travelling through Scandinavia. One of these friends was Norwegian, and her parents had graciously agreed to house and feed us all for a night. Sitting down that evening to eat, her father asked each of us in turn where we were from. Alongside Jeff and me, there was a Canadian, an Australian, a Dutchman and a Scot. Her father listened and nodded, occasionally asking questions. When it came to my turn and I answered, ‘Shetland’, he looked at me and smiled. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you are one of us.’ Many Norwegians still cherish the links between the islands and themselves. As a Shetlander, one feels welcomed in this country, like a distant relative come to visit, or an emigrant returned.

  On that occasion, as on this one, I felt close to home here. But this time I also felt ready to go back. Wandering the grand streets of Oslo, frozen half to the bone, I found it hard to keep my mind where it was supposed to be. The stinging cold made it difficult to concentrate; it clawed at my face and crackled inside my nostrils. And everywhere I stopped, it seemed, were reminders of other places. In Oslo, the parallel kept turning in on itself. It was no longer a straight line at all, but a tangled, knotted thread that looped this way and that around the world.

  Inside the National Gallery, an exhibition of work by Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven brought me back, inevitably, to northern Canada. Those magnificent paintings – of lakes and rivers; of dark forests, empty of people – cried out for reverence. They demanded quiet. For the Group of Seven the landscape was something close to sacred, and they, as artists, were its faithful congregation.

  In the University of Oslo’s historical museum I was carried back further still. Displayed there were clothing and other artefacts from Roald Amundsen’s Arctic expedition of 1903, on which he traversed the Northwest Passage for the first time. On a globe in the exhibition room was marked the route he had taken, following the sixtieth parallel west from Norway, past Shetland, past Cape Farewell, before turning north through the Davis Strait. Amundsen returned from this successful trip in 1906, shortly after his country’s independence from Sweden. On future expeditions he was the first to reach the South Pole, thirty-four days ahead
of Captain Scott, and he made the first undisputed visit to the North Pole too, by airship, in 1926. Like Tom Thomson, Roald Amundsen would later disappear in the north, but unlike Thomson, his body was never found.

  Visiting the Viking Ship Museum on the western edge of the city, I was brought home. It occurred to me there that, while I was in Oslo, Shetland’s Viking festival, Up Helly Aa, was taking place. That event – a piece of revivalist pageantry invented by nostalgic Victorians – is one of the big moments in the islands’ calendar. Each year, hundreds of men (and only men) march through the streets of Lerwick, with flaming torches held aloft. Some are dressed as Vikings, all Hollywood helmets and gleaming chain mail, while others sport costumes that range from Disney characters to local celebrities. At the end of this procession, a replica longship is burned in a park in the centre of town. And then the men get very drunk, which is perhaps the most authentically Viking thing about Up Helly Aa. Many Shetlanders take the festival extremely seriously; others roll their eyes each time it comes around.

  I couldn’t remain in Oslo long. I was restless and impatient, and increasingly eager to be moving. Sitting in a café one afternoon, I decided to cut short my trip and go west towards the coast. There I would be closer to the end of the line. In front of me was a mediocre cup of coffee and a few slices of bread and jam that together had cost almost £10. From the speakers, a twenty-second snatch of an Elvis Presley song was playing, stopping, then repeating, over and over. The woman behind the counter didn’t seem to notice, and I didn’t feel like mentioning it. Each time I looked up she seemed to be staring at me, with a gaze that could have been friendly or suspicious, it was hard to tell. There was something disorientating about the woman: her white hair was too large for her head and her glasses too small for her eyes. I threw back the last mouthful of coffee, stood up and nodded a thank you, then I walked to the train station and booked my seat to Bergen for the following day.

  The morning was still gloomy and grey as we headed west from the station, just after eight, through the suburbs and out towards wooded hills and snowy valleys. I fought the urge to close my eyes, and watched instead as we moved through the brightening pre-dawn. At the town of Drammen, the sun was just rising over the water, glowing orange as an ember, though still soft and uncertain around its edges. For a moment it seemed to droop or melt, no longer a circle but an oblong, wilting beneath its own distant heat. In the harbour, steam curled upwards from the sea into the frozen day. I tried to remember a less than flattering Norwegian joke I’d heard once about this town: It’s better to have a dram an hour than an hour in Drammen. Or something like that.

  Pushing along steep mountainsides, blinking in and out of tunnels, the train threw puffs of ice into the air around us, like smoke belching from an engine. As we climbed higher, the clouds seemed to stoop to meet us. The peaks were all obscured, and everything faded upwards into grey. Even close by, the green of the pines seemed no longer a real colour at all, but instead a new shade of darkness. On either side of the track, each tree bore its burden of snow differently. The conifers were heavy with it – needles and branches arched towards the ground – while silver birches stood delicate as feathers, their leafless twigs a perfect web of white. Up here, the land lay as though in suspended animation. We passed a river, not quite frozen but congealed, as thick and lumpy as custard. In the mountain hamlets, little houses sat with a foot of snow upon their roofs and an exclamation mark of smoke above their chimneys. Flags hung listless from poles. Everything was still except for the train rushing past. From each of these things we were separated by glass and metal, and then by time. In seconds they were gone, a glancing memory, as though perhaps they never quite existed at all. There is much that time takes away and doesn’t give back. There is much we wish to keep but lose, just as there is much we wish to lose but can’t.

  In Geilo, the carriage began to empty as people gathered bags and ski equipment and stepped outside. There, at eight hundred metres above sea level and fifteen degrees below freezing, the sun was just beginning to break through. And further still, at Finse – the highest train station in northern Europe, at more than twelve hundred metres – the sky finally cleared. Snow covered everything there. The buildings were swamped by it. The fences had disappeared. There were no trees and no cars, only quads and snowmobiles, skis and paraskis. From my seat at the window, I squinted out into the dazzling day, where the whole world was winter-lit, and sparkled with anticipation.

  Bergen must be one of the most picturesque cities in Europe, with its wonky, multicoloured waterfront and precipitous backdrop of mountains. But it is also, certainly, one of the wettest cities. It seems to rain almost constantly from the heavy clouds cradled above the fjords. On this occasion, a steady drizzle covered everything, and the streets were ankle-deep with slush. Everyone stepped slowly and carefully through it, trying to avoid slipping or being splashed by the traffic. But neither was entirely avoidable. Every so often a head would drop down and a pair of legs would come up, accompanied by a yelp. The unfortunate pedestrian would be assisted back to their feet, and everything would continue as before. I spent two damp days exploring the city, then made my preparations to go on.

  There are few places in the world where a return journey requiring four buses and three ferries could be planned with confidence for a single day. But in Scandinavia, where public transport is about as reliable as the over-pricing of beer, I didn’t doubt for a moment that such a journey would be possible. My destination was the island of Stolmen, a little further south along the coast. It was the last point of land on the sixtieth parallel before it dropped back into the North Sea and then returned to Shetland, and it seemed the most appropriate place to complete my journey before going home. Flicking through the timetables in my hotel room in Bergen, I could see that buses were scheduled to coincide with ferries, and that each connection could be made to fit. The route to Stolmen was rather convoluted, with several changes required, but the return journey was much simpler. A single bus could bring me all the way, including on to the ferry. I could get there and back in a day without any trouble at all, it seemed. I could even have a few hours to wander and explore the island if the weather was good.

  The bus drove southwards, past villages and half frozen fjords, in a misty brightness like an English autumn dawn. The sun was uncertain, haze-hidden then bright – a game of celestial hide-and-seek. It seemed a good day to be moving. The route was southwards first, from Bergen to Haljem, where the bus boarded a ferry to Sandvikvåg. From there I took another ferry, northwest to Husavik, on the island of Huftarøy. It was all so easy and effortless, and after only a couple of hours I was most of the way there. At that point, though, the plans I’d made dissolved. There was no drama and no panic, they just dissolved. The connecting bus was due five minutes after the ferry arrived in Husavik, and so I stood and waited at the stop beside the terminal, enjoying the pace of the day. From that stop I had an excellent view of the bus as it appeared, right on schedule, along the road just adjacent to the terminal. I watched it drive along that road, carefully follow each curve, then continue on its way without taking the turn down to where I was standing. It was one of those static moments, like when you shut the door and immediately remember that your keys are on the other side. For a few seconds it seems that, if you regret it hard enough, you might just be able to turn back time. Only the click of that lock separates you from your keys; only a few steps separated me from the correct bus stop on the road above. I stood there doing nothing for several minutes, as though some unimagined solution might just fall from the sky in front of me. The next bus was not for hours – too late to get me to Stolmen and back by the end of the day. I had only two choices: return to Bergen or go on.

  I hate hitchhiking. I truly hate it. Perhaps because I only ever do it when absolutely necessary, there is a deep sense of humiliation in me every time I am forced into that position. And what increases that humiliation, what marks it like a scar upon me, is that I am terribl
e at it. In the half dozen or so times I’ve tried to hitchhike in Europe, I’ve been successful only twice. I have come to believe that somehow my face is unsuitable for the task. It must be a face that people just don’t want in their cars, because nobody ever stops for me. They don’t stop for me in Shetland and they certainly didn’t stop for me in Norway. Following the road west towards where the bus had gone, I stuck out my thumb and smiled at every approaching car. And every car sailed on by, without so much as glance. After an hour or so of this repeated rejection I understood that my choices had been reduced to one. The least humiliating option was to ignore the cars and just keep walking.

  I had no idea how far that walk would be, or whether it would get me where I wanted to go in time; and to begin with that absence of certainty only increased my fury. I took every passing vehicle as an insult and every magpie’s cackle as a slight. I cursed my journey, and the sheer futility of what I was doing. I cursed myself for my own stupidity. I was looking for a line that didn’t really exist, on an island about which I knew nothing. I was striding through a winter afternoon, cold, cross and dejected.

  But as the walk wore on, an invigorating acceptance descended on me. I put one foot in front of the other and moved forward. I didn’t know when I would get to Stolmen, that was true; but I knew that I would get there. And I didn’t know if I could get back to Bergen that day, but I would get back sometime. Walking like that, blocking out the worries and the doubts, I barely noticed the places through which I passed. My thoughts were elsewhere entirely, and yet nowhere in particular. When I arrived in Bekkjarvik after two hours of walking, I was almost as surprised as I was relieved, and when I consulted a timetable at the bus stop by the harbour, I found that a school bus was scheduled to leave the village for Stolmen twenty minutes later. It would give me just over an hour on the island before I had to make my way back to Bergen.